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As 2010 is wrapping up, it is about time do a sum up of the best sites that I’ve featured on Best Web Gallery. Again I’ve selected 50 sites from different categories: personal blog, commercial, agency, portfolio, and software. In 2010, CSS design is getting more interactive. People are using jQuery and CSS animation to add interaction in their design. More designers are using custom font faces. Some have incorporated responsive web design using media query. Responsive design is definitely the next big thing that we should look forward to.

Did you know that Adobe Photoshop is 20 years old and Illustrator has been around over 24 years? I’ve been using Photoshop since version 5 and Illustrator since version 8. It is amazing to see how they are progressively improving and adding more features. Now with vector features and 3D tools, Photoshop is no longer just an image editing tool. The same goes with Illustrator, Bristle Brushes were added to simulate bitmap drawing. I’ve been using CS5 for several months so in this post, I’m going to share my thoughts on CS5.

If you are looking for an unique way to brand your business card, then you’ve got to check this post. I’ve collected over 80 creative and unique business cards from different types of business. Some of them are visually appealling, some have fancy die cut, some are edible, and some are just crazy. The examples in this post proves that business cards don’t have to be printed on card stock in standard size. Business cards can be done on any material in any form.

Last week I talked about 960 Grid System is Getting Old. Surprisingly a lot of comments have been made. It seems like people are using 960gs because of the "golden ratio" — all numbers are even. I’m a designer, not a grid scientist. Why restrict your layout so that it can fit into this 960gs? A grid is supposed to help you in design, not to limit your creativity. The 978 grid, that I mentioned before, is not just about increasing the page width, but to loosen the gutter space so users can read it more comfortably. Today, I would like to write a follow up post to further ellaborate on some of the points I brought up initially.

For several years now the 960px grid system (960.gs) has been designers’ favorite pick to help structure and design web layouts. As screens and resolutions have gotten bigger, I’ve found that the 960 grid system does not always fit my needs. 20px gutters and only a 940px content area is a bit too small for the modern web. While designing Themify, I found a new grid layout that works quite well for designing in this day and age. If you’ve never heard of 960 I’ve detailed both it and this newer gird system below.

CSS2 allows you to specify stylesheet for specific media type such as screen or print. Now CSS3 makes it even more efficient by adding media queries. You can add expressions to media type to check for certain conditions and apply different stylesheets. For example, you can have one stylesheet for large displays and a different stylesheet specifically for mobile devices. It is quite powerful because it allows you to tailor to different resolutions and devices without changing the content. Continue on this post to read the tutorial and see some websites that make good use of media queries.

The other day I was trying to style CSS3 border-radius to image element and I realized that Firefox doesn’t display border-radius on images. Then I figured a way to work around it — wrap a span tag around with the original image as a background-image. Thanks to Darcy Clarke for the jQuery code which does the magic tag wrapping automatically.